May 19, 2016
According to Wikipedia, on this date in 1743, Jean-Pierre Christin (May 31, 1683 – January 19, 1755) a French physicist, mathematician, astronomer and musician improved the Celcius scale thermometer. His proposal to reverse the Celsius thermometer scale (from water boiling at 0 degrees and ice melting at 100 degrees, to water boiling at 100 degrees and ice melting at 0 degrees) was widely accepted and is still in use today.
Christin was born in Lyon. He was a founding member of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon and served as its Permanent Secretary from 1713 until 1755. His thermometer was known in France before the Revolution as the thermometer of Lyon. One of these thermometers was kept at Science Museum in London.
In 1742, Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701–1744) created a temperature scale which was the reverse of the scale now known by the name "Celsius": 0 represented the boiling point of water, while 100 represented the freezing point of water. In his paper Observations of two persistent degrees on a thermometer, he recounted his experiments showing that the melting point of ice is essentially unaffected by pressure. He also determined with remarkable precision how the boiling point of water varied as a function of atmospheric pressure. He proposed that the zero point of his temperature scale, being the boiling point, would be calibrated at the mean barometric pressure at mean sea level. This pressure is known as one standard atmosphere. The BIPM's 10th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) later defined one standard atmosphere to equal precisely 1013250dynes per square centimetre(101.325 kPa).
In 1743, the Lyonnais physicist Jean-Pierre Christin, permanent secretary of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon, working independently of Celsius, developed a scale where zero represented the freezing point of water and 100 represented the boiling point of water. On 19 May 1743 he published the design of a mercury thermometer, the "Thermometer of Lyon" built by the craftsman Pierre Casati that used this scale.
In 1744, coincident with the death of Anders Celsius, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) reversed Celsius's scale. His custom-made "linnaeus-thermometer", for use in his greenhouses, was made by Daniel Ekström, Sweden's leading maker of scientific instruments at the time and whose workshop was located in the basement of the Stockholm observatory. As often happened in this age before modern communications, numerous physicists, scientists, and instrument makers are credited with having independently developed this same scale, among them were Pehr Elvius, the secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (which had an instrument workshop) and with whom Linnaeus had been corresponding; Daniel Ekström, the instrument maker; and Mårten Strömer (1707–1770) who had studied astronomy under Anders Celsius.
The first known Swedish document reporting temperatures in this modern "forward" Celsius scale is the paperHortus Upsaliensis dated 16 December 1745 that Linnaeus wrote to a student of his, Samuel Nauclér. In it, Linnaeus recounted the temperatures inside the orangery at the Botanical Garden of Uppsala University:
...since the caldarium (the hot part of the greenhouse) by the angle of the windows, merely from the rays of the sun, obtains such heat that the thermometer often reaches 30 degrees, although the keen gardener usually takes care not to let it rise to more than 20 to 25 degrees, and in winter not under 15 degrees...
Centigrade and Celsius - Since the 19th century, the scientific and thermometry communities worldwide referred to this scale as the centigrade scale. Temperatures on the centigrade scale were often reported simply as degrees or, when greater specificity was desired, as degrees centigrade. The symbol for temperature values on this scale is °C.
Because the term centigrade was also the Spanish and French language name for a unit of angular measurement (1/100 of a right angle) and had a similar connotation in other languages, the term centesimal degree was used when very precise, unambiguous language was required by international standards bodies such as the BIPM. The 9th CGPM and the CIPM (Comité international des poids et mesures) formally adopted "degree Celsius" (symbol: °C) in 1948.
It was not until February 1985 that the forecasts issued by the BBC switched from "centigrade" to "Celsius".
For scientific use, "Celsius" is the term usually used, with "centigrade" otherwise continuing to be in common but decreasing use, especially in informal contexts in English-speaking countries.[17]
Image: wikipedia.com
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